Sweet Life

On the first of November 2001, Turkish viewers met a man who had spent his life scrubbing other people's floors and had just decided he was done with the view from below. Haluk Bilginer played İhsan Yıldırım, a cleaning-company owner whose new money sends him hunting for a posh Etiler address. Show TV aired the result, Tatlı Hayat, for 106 episodes over three and a half years.

The show was a format adaptation of The Jeffersons, the American sitcom about a newly rich family moving into a luxury building. Creators Haluk Özenç and Bora Tekay moved the premise from Manhattan to Istanbul's Etiler district and let the culture clash do the rest. Opposite Bilginer stood Türkan Şoray, one of the biggest stars Turkish cinema has produced, playing his wife Sevinç with a warmth that kept the satire from turning cruel.

The Yıldırıms land next door to the Kasapoğlular, a Greek-Istanbulite family played by Neco and Çolpan İlhan. The comedy comes from the friction between old Istanbul and new money, and from İhsan's repeated attempts to pass as something he isn't. MEDYAPIM produced the series, which ran from November 2001 to April 2005. [edit]

İhsan Yıldırım made his fortune in cleaning. Not inherited money, not old Istanbul money, but the kind that comes from building a business out of other people's messes. By the time the series opens, that fortune has grown large enough to make him restless. He wants out of the old neighborhood and into Etiler, the district where the city's professional class keeps its apartments and its manners. His wife Sevinç would rather keep the life they have. She goes along with the move anyway, and the show's central tension is set: a man chasing a version of himself that the neighbors can see right through.

The Yıldırım household includes their grown son Başar, played by Emre Altuğ, who drifts between his father's ambitions and his mother's common sense. The move puts them in the same building as the Kasapoğlular. Yorgo Kasapoğlu, played by Neco, is a Greek-Istanbulite with the easy confidence of someone who has always belonged. His wife Feraye, played by Çolpan İlhan, matches him in poise. Their daughter Pelin, played by Gamze Özçelik, becomes a romantic interest for Başar, giving the show its second engine: two families with different histories, circling each other through their children.

Around this core, the apartment block fills with recurring faces. Celal Kadri Kınoğlu plays İrfan, Asuman Dabak plays Menekşe Kocaman, and Veysel Diker plays Muharrem. These characters give the show its texture, the small running jokes and familiar entrances that make a long sitcom feel like a place you visit.

The series runs on episodic comedy rather than serialized plot. Each episode drops İhsan into a new social situation, a dinner, a business deal, a building committee, and watches him overplay his hand. Sevinç pulls him back. The Kasapoğlular watch from across the hall. The class anxiety underneath never resolves because the show isn't interested in resolving it. It is interested in the comedy of a man who cannot quite believe he has arrived and a neighborhood that cannot quite believe he has either.

Season one establishes the move and the new neighbors. Season two, which ran to 71 episodes according to the available records, stretches the premise across a longer stretch of broadcast, bringing in new visitors and new chances for İhsan to embarrass himself in front of people he wants to impress. The show's final stretch aired into 2005, closing out a run that had started in the first year of the new millennium. The arc is less a story than a sustained joke about class, told with enough affection that the audience stayed for 106 episodes.[edit]